US debt clock running out of time, space.

Tue Mar 28, 3:15 AM ET

NEW YORK (AFP) - Tick, 20,000 dollars, tock, another 20,000 dollars.

So rapid is the rise of the US national debt, that the last four
digits of a giant digital signboard counting the moving total near New
York's Times Square move in seemingly random increments as they
struggle to keep pace.

The national debt clock, as it is known, is a big clock. A spot-check
last week showed a readout of 8.3 trillion -- or more precisely
8,310,200,545,702 -- dollars ... and counting.

But it's not big enough.

Sometime in the next two years, the total amount of US government
borrowing is going to break through the 10-trillion-dollar mark and,
lacking space for the extra digit such a figure would require, the
clock is in danger of running itself into obsolescence.

The clock's owner, real estate developer Douglas Durst, knew such a
problem could arise but hadn't counted on it so soon.

"We really expected it to be quite some time," Durst told AFP. "But
now, with the pace of debt growth only increasing, we're looking at
maybe two years and certainly before President (George W.) Bush leaves
office in 2009."

The clock was the invention of Durst's father, Seymour Durst, who
nursed a keen sense of fiscal responsibility and believed government
profligacy to be a national curse.

The elder Durst, who died in 1995, originally thought of the idea in
the early 1980s as the US budget deficit started to mount during the
presidency of Ronald Reagan, but the technology was not immediately
available to realise his vision.

The original 11 foot by 26 foot (3.3 meter by 8.9 meter) clock was
eventually erected a block from Manhattan's Times Square in 1989 when
the national debt stood at 2.7 trillion.

For the next decade it tracked, odometer style, the government's red
ink with an extra feature which, by dividing the main figure by the
number of families in the country, offered an estimate for how much
each family owed as their share.

Toward the close of the millennium, with a booming economy fuelling
annual budget surpluses, the clock began to slow and finally ran into
its first mechanical problem.

"It wasn't designed to run backwards," Douglas Durst explained.

Believing that the signboard had served its purpose, the Dursts pulled
the plug in 2000 with the debt total showing around 5.7 trillion
dollars and the individual "family share" standing at close to 74,000
dollars.

The clock was covered with a red, white and blue curtain, but not
dismantled.

"We'll have it ready in case things start turning around, which I'm
sure they will," Durst said at the time.

He only had to wait two years as the Bush presidency coincided with an
upsurge in borrowing. The curtain was raised in 2002 and the digital
readout flickered back to life showing a national debt of 6.1 trillion
dollars with the numerals whizzing round faster than ever.

In 2004, the old clock was torn down and replaced with a newer model
which had optimistically been modified to run backwards should such a
happy necessity arise.

Instead the debt continued to rise at such a rate that the once
unthinkable total of 10 trillion dollars veered from alarmist fantasy
into the realm of impending reality.

"When it became clear what was going to happen, our first thought was
to free up the digital square occupied by the dollar sign so that we
could cope with a 14th digit," Durst said.

The latest plan is for yet another replacement, involving a larger
scale signboard.

"We're not happy at the impact we're making with this one," he said.

Durst insists that the clock is non-partisan in its effort to shame the
federal government over what he sees as its willingness to gamble away
the nation's future.

"We're a family business," Durst said. "We think generationally, and we
don't want to see the next generation crippled by this burden," he
said.

Last week, the "family share" readout on the clock stood some loose
change short of 90,000 dollars.

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